That hasn’t changed today. But, in lieu of actual thought, I’d like to give you a few glimpses at the things that are making me tick right now.

A Palestinian man wails over the dead body of a Hamas security officer Saturday. (This is the version we ran in the paper, CLICK for the uncropped, much more gruesome version.)

1.) Pictures of dead people. That sounds weird, I’m sure. But today’s Israeli attack on Hamas — the bloodiest single event in decades of the conflict — has me thinking about fallen man in fallen world; and how in the world we, America, can presume to know anything about these people in a land far, far away; and how thankful I am to live in such a peaceful place; and how spoiled I am to live a life so detached from the real struggles being dealt with by most of the rest of the world.

2.) Hip-hop as mood-altering drug. I’ll leave 98 percent of rap on the shelf, but I still have some love for thoughtful lyrics with interesting production behind them. A particular favorite right now is Erykah Badu’s “New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War)” — here’s a track that’s particularly gripping. (Disclaimer 1: The overdramatic narrative at the end of the song is dumb, so feel free to stop the track once that starts. Disclaimer 2: It’s rap. There’s profanity. Deal with it.)

I use this stuff to get through nights like tonight, when every piece of “news” I edit seems utterly disposable. Other favorites include Outkast and the first two albums by Goodie Mob.

3.) Civilizational declines, circa 2000 and onward. A brief list:

a.) I hate “ringtones.” If you have one, well, I’m not apologizing to you. Because it’s obnoxious! If I wanted to listen to your favorite song, I’d ask you what it is, then go home and buy in on iTunes (or, more likely, look it up on YouTube). But being assaulted in public by some jerk’s phone playing only the chorus — today, it was “here I go again on my own!” — is audial rape of the worst kind. Seriously, people, go through your phone’s settings… I promise there’s some sort of alert on there that just makes a beep or a ring or something.

b1.) Voice mail slackers. You know who you are… you choose not to answer the phone — which is fine — but then you don’t return the call after listening to the message! You are almost as bad as…

b2.) Voice mail harassers. Now THIS kills me. You call me, and for whatever reason I don’t answer. So you don’t leave a message. Then you call again five minutes later, and I still don’t answer; this time you do leave a message. Then, five more minutes later, you call AGAIN! What part of “leave a message and I’ll call you back” do you not understand? Seriously, this strikes me as subhuman.

c.) The Snuggie. In case you haven’t seen it, I’ve embedded a clip below… basically, it’s a blanket with sleeves that’s being marketed as the best thing since sliced bread. In reality, it makes its wearer look like an Imperial Guard (and they suggest you wear them to sporting events!!) and is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of. I get hit with depression every morning, when I open my email with 10 new messages and soon realize nine of them are spam for The Snuggie. What makes me more depressed is that I haven’t come up with an equally dumb idea upon which to get rich.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xZp-GLMMJ0[/youtube]

One of the things (IMO) that got the press enamored with Obama — just as it had years before with McCain, prior to his campaign’s drastic leash-tightening — was his seeming penchant to speak at length about whatever was asked. Sure, he sidestepped some things, but Obama generally gave much more detailed, thoughtful answers than his competitors in a soundbite, CYA atmosphere. He also vowed greater transparency in government, and often urged the Bush White House to come clean with the American people about the topic of the day. (Note, please, that I think those sentiments a fine idea, part of the most attractive aspect of Obama ‘08.)

In the face of the scandal involving his governor and his Senate seat, however, Obama is not giving me much hope for the transparency I’ve been waiting for. From Politico:

Obama refused to answer questions about his staff’s involvement with Gov. Rod Blagojevich over filling the vacated Senate seat and whether his successor should now be chosen by appointment or special election.

Obama, speaking to reporters after a news conference announcing his secretary of education, said the internal review he had ordered of his staff’s contacts with Blagojevich was complete but cited the request of the U.S. attorney’s office to hold off on disclosing the results until next week. … Obama flashed some irritation at the line of questioning, cutting off McCormick before he could finish his initial query. [bold mine-R]

This is the oldest trick in the book, and not a very convincing one. How many times in the past eight years has some White House spokesman refused to answer a legitimate question, citing the need for a “full investigation” or “findings to be disclosed” or some such thing? Journalists will write it, yes, but we don’t buy it for a second; it’s a hollow non-answer, and 99-to-1 a pretty blatant lie. Obama has been sidestepping (or refusing to answer) the Blago questions for more than a week now, despite the repeated assertion that Obama had no role in it and did nothing wrong. Truth be told, even most Republicans don’t think Obama was in the middle of Rod’s insane shenanigans, but it portends “more of the same” to hear Obama using the “we need to wait until the investigation is complete” line.

The state of education: Obama’s pick for Education Secretary needs to watch his pronouns:

“I want to thank our mutual friend John Rogers who has been a mentor and friend to me since I was ten years old. He gave my sister and I the opportunity to start a great school in the South side of Chicago…”

Do you see what I see?

Dick Cavett is still awesome: He writes an occasional blog for the Times; this installment is on the Senate Seat Salesman himself:

The question overhanging this sordid mess, you might agree, is, “How did such a specimen ever get elected?”

It’s as if a soldier, tested for his fitness as potential combat leader, passed his physical despite scurvy, pyorrhea, Jake leg, leprosy, the quinsy, contagious influenza and at least two trick knees.

(We all know from childhood that it’s not nice to make fun of people’s appearance. So I will confine myself to merely observing that whatever covers the governor’s head looks to me like a bowling-ball cozy.)

(Hat tip to my wife for the clever title of this post.)

1.) The Brightest Are Not Always the Best: Frank Rich looks at Obama’s economic appointees with a suspicious eye, and for good reason.

As Barack Obama rolls out his cabinet, “the best and the brightest” has become the accolade du jour from Democrats (Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri), Republicans (Senator John Warner of Virginia) and the press (George Stephanopoulos). Few seem to recall that the phrase, in its original coinage, was meant to strike a sardonic, not a flattering, note …

Lawrence Summers, the new top economic adviser, was the youngest tenured professor in Harvard’s history and is famous for never letting anyone forget his brilliance. It was his highhanded disregard for his own colleagues, not his impolitic remarks about gender and science, that forced him out of Harvard’s presidency in four years. Timothy Geithner, the nominee for Treasury secretary, is the boy wonder president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He comes with none of Summers’s personal baggage, but his sparkling résumé is missing one crucial asset: experience outside academe and government, in the real world of business and finance. Postgraduate finishing school at Kissinger & Associates doesn’t count.

Summers and Geithner are both protégés of another master of the universe, Robert Rubin. His appearance in the photo op for Obama-transition economic advisers three days after the election was, to put it mildly, disconcerting. Ever since his acclaimed service as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, Rubin has labored as a senior adviser and director at Citigroup, now being bailed out by taxpayers to the potential tune of some $300 billion. Somehow the all-seeing Rubin didn’t notice the toxic mortgage-derivatives on Citi’s books until it was too late. The Citi may never sleep, but he snored.

Geithner was no less tardy in discovering the reckless, wholesale gambling that went on in Wall Street’s big casinos, all of which cratered while at least nominally under his regulatory watch. That a Hydra-headed banking monster like Citigroup came to be in the first place was a direct byproduct of deregulation championed by Rubin and Summers in Clinton’s Treasury Department (where Geithner also served). The New Deal reform they helped repeal, the Glass-Steagall Act, had been enacted in 1933 in part because Citigroup’s ancestor, National City Bank, had imploded after repackaging bad loans as toxic securities in the go-go 1920s.

Well, nobody’s perfect. Given that John McCain’s economic team was headlined by Carly Fiorina and Joe the Plumber, the country would be dodging a fiscal bullet even if Obama had picked Suze Orman. But I keep wondering why the honeymoon hagiography about the best and the brightest has been so over the top.

2.) Abortion Politics Didn’t Doom the GOP: The Atlantic’s Ross Douhat gets a spot in the Grey Lady to explain why pro-choice Republicans’ laments over the fundamentalist wing are misguided and unfounded.

(M)ore frustrating than the blame game is the equally familiar advice that has accompanied it. Most abortion opponents can recite the litany by heart. Their movement should focus on changing hearts and minds, rather than the law. It should be more consistently pro-life, by helping human beings outside the womb as well as those within it. It should cease trying to roll back the sexual revolution and standing athwart science yelling “stop!” And above all, it should be less absolutist, and more amenable to compromise.

Obviously there’s wisdom in some of these suggestions. But pro-lifers have already taken much of it to heart. Compromise, rather than absolutism, has been the watchword of anti-abortion efforts for some time now. Since the early 1990s, advocates have focused on pushing largely modest state-level restrictions, from parental notification laws to waiting periods to bans on what we see as the grisliest forms of abortion…

So the question isn’t whether the anti-abortion movement can change, adapt and compromise. It’s already done that. The question is whether it can afford to compromise on the national issue that keeps serious pro-lifers in the Republican fold, and requires an abortion litmus test for Republican presidential nominees — namely, the composition of the courts. And here the pro-life movement is essentially trapped — not by its own inflexibility, but by the inflexibility of the Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence…

The public is amenable to compromise: majorities support keeping abortion legal in some cases, but polling by CBS News and The Times during the presidential campaign showed that more Americans supported new restrictions on abortion than said it should be available on demand. And while some pro-lifers would reject any bargain, many more would be delighted to strike a deal that extends legal protection to more of the unborn, even if it stopped short of achieving the movement’s ultimate goals.

But no such compromise is possible so long as Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey remain on the books. These decisions are monuments to pro-choice absolutism, and for pro-lifers to accept them means accepting that no serious legal restrictions on abortion will ever be possible — no matter what the polls say, and no matter how many hearts and minds pro-lifers change.

Overturning Roe and Casey has never been an easy task, and the election of Barack Obama will make it that much more difficult. Facing a hostile governing majority, pro-lifers can and should talk more about the possibility of compromise: They should explain, more often and more cogently, that if Americans want laws that better reflect their muddled sentiments on abortion, it is pro-choice maximalism, not the pro-life movement, that’s really standing in the way.

3.) On Joe the Plumber and his forthcoming book: You may remember I mentioned some weeks back that Samuel J. Wurzelbacher has launched a website and has a book coming out? (It’s here, if you missed it.) Well tomorrow, Timothy Egan takes ol’ Joe to task! (Fair warning: This guy is as cutting as they come.)

The unlicensed pipe fitter known as Joe the Plumber is out with a book this month, just as the last seconds on his 15 minutes are slipping away. I have a question for Joe: Do you want me to fix your leaky toilet?

I didn’t think so. And I don’t want you writing books. Not when too many good novelists remain unpublished. Not when too many extraordinary histories remain unread. Not when too many riveting memoirs are kicked back at authors after 10 years of toil. Not when voices in Iran, North Korea or China struggle to get past a censor’s gate.

Joe, a k a Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, was no good as a citizen, having failed to pay his full share of taxes, no good as a plumber, not being fully credentialed, and not even any good as a faux American icon. Who could forget poor John McCain at his most befuddled, calling out for his working-class surrogate on a day when Joe stiffed him.

With a résumé full of failure, he now thinks he can join the profession of Mark Twain, George Orwell and Joan Didion.

He also gets some punches in at Sarah “2012″ Palin:

Next up may be Sarah Palin, who is said to be worth nearly $7 million if she can place her thoughts between covers. Publishers: with all the grim news of layoffs and staff cuts at the venerable houses of American letters, can we set some ground rules for these hard times? Anyone who abuses the English language on such a regular basis should not be paid to put words in print.

Here’s Palin’s response, after Matt Lauer asked her when she knew the election was lost:

“I had great faith that, you know, perhaps when that voter entered that voting booth and closed that curtain that what would kick in for them was, perhaps, a bold step that would have to be taken in casting a vote for us, but having to put a lot of faith in that commitment we tried to articulate that we were the true change agent that would progress this nation.”

I have no idea what she said in that thicket of words. [bolds mine-R]

The guys I play music with (we’re called Foxhole) are some of the most important people in my life, and I truly love — and even long for — the communion and the art and the raw passion of it. I’m not your typical band guy… performing is generally my least favorite part: I often find myself wandering around the venue, depressed at the lack of intellect I perceive, the lack of success that I feel, the lack of all the things I thought music was about when I first got into it about a decade ago. I love the organic process of writing music (a process at which we’re very slow and inefficient), and even enjoy the stressful “do it again” atmosphere of recording. Performing… well, I always get jazzed up ahead of time, but once it happens it feels like a big waste. But I digress…

I’m selling my amplifier, which I honestly love and have never had any complaints with, in order to get one that’s somewhat smaller and more portable; despite the fact that I rarely “play out” anymore, for some reason the downsizing feels like an urgent need, the task a heavy weight on my shoulders that simply has to be lifted. On reflection, it makes very little sense… the new amp (an Orange Tiny Terror Combo, whose size belies its eardrum-busting loudness) is going to sound great, but lacks a lot of the features I’m used to in an amp and adds literally nothing, save the portability. Oh, and it’s 37 pounds, so it’s not THAT portable. 

It’s just an outward sign, I think, of the inward struggle of Justin right now. If I didn’t have to deal with the shop, I would argue hard for me, my wife and two little boys to move into my parents’ basement in Louisville — saving money and having built-in free babysitting all at once! I walk through our tiny house and have this burning impulse to throw away (or, if possible, sell on eBay) half the things I see. I dream of making a large chunk of money at once, if not to free up my schedule than at least to secure a bit of sanity for a month or two or ten. 

And of course, there’s the money, of which I have very little right now… Lewis’ autism therapies will not be cheap, and insurance doesn’t cover most useful treatments for autism. (Hell, a lot of doctors still have no idea how to treat it, and even the most well-documented treatments are still shunned by the majority of the medical community.)

This is where I’m supposed to wrap up the blog entry with the moral… except that I don’t know what it is. I know what it SHOULD be: God is bigger than me, and I should have faith that he’ll work in these circumstances. I know that, and somewhere inside I believe it. But it’s cold outside and the well is running dry (that being job opportunities, new avenues to explore, a young but still aging man’s chances at finding “happiness”), and all I know to do is rearrange.

Obama and his team of rivals, proving that blue is the new black.

Though you probably figured it out already, I cast my presidential vote for Barack Obama. I didn’t get too caught up in the hype, but was mainly voting for a.) a change in the demeanor of politics in general (a man who doesn’t answer debate questions with soundbites wins? Whoda thunk it?) and b.) a “change” in our nation’s approach to foreign policy.

Well, it looks like I can chalk that second one up to buyer’s remorse.

Don’t get me wrong: I think Obama’s temperament and (seeming) interest in reasoned discourse instead of steadfast ideology is going to serve us much better than McCain’s hard-nosed, “We must always WIN” attitude. But based on Obama’s newly named foreign policy team, I think that (where foreign policy is concerned) we were sold a decidedly false bill of goods. Consider:

Robert Gates, current secretary of defense, who will stick around, despite his earlier saying that he probably wouldn’t.

From the New York Times:

Mr. Obama’s best political cover may come from Mr. Gates, the former Central Intelligence Agency director and veteran of the cold war, who just months ago said it was “hard to imagine any circumstance” in which he would stay in his post at the Pentagon. Now he will do exactly that.

A year ago, to studied silence from the Bush White House, Mr. Gates began giving a series of speeches about the limits of military power in wars in which no military victory is possible. He made popular the statistic, quoted by Mr. Obama, that the United States has more members of military marching bands than foreign service officers.

He also denounced “the gutting of America’s ability to engage, assist and communicate with other parts of the world — the ‘soft power’ which had been so important throughout the cold war.”

Sounds nice, right? But consider this observation from the Huffington Post:

“Secretary Gates is a great choice,” said (Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham), who was reminded that he had once said he feared the day that Barack Obama became commander-in-chief.

Hmmm… Anyway, next is Gen. Jim Jones, a former NATO commander and soon-to-be national security adviser. Graham goes on: 

“Jim Jones, known him for a long time, former NATO commander. He opposed the surge early on, but he’s a four-star general with a lot of national security knowledge.”

McCain’s best friend Graham? A very partisan Republican? Gushing about Obama’s foreign policy picks? Something’s not right… But of course, there’s still the real elephant — or jackass? — in the room, Secretary-of-State-designate Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Clinton? The woman who made an ad suggesting she was the only one fit to answer the phone at 3 a.m.? Who said something to the effect of “McCain’s ready, I’m ready, Barack… I dunno”? Whose judgment Obama repeatedly called into question where the Senate’s vote on the Iraq war is concerned? I don’t find myself agreeing too often with avowed atheist and Islamophobe Christopher Hitchens, but his recent Slate column contains a lot of truth:

In matters of foreign policy, it has been proved time and again, the Clintons are devoted to no interest other than their own. A president absolutely has to know of his chief foreign-policy executive that he or she has no other agenda than the one he has set. Who can say with a straight face that this is true of a woman whose personal ambition is without limit; whose second loyalty is to an impeached and disbarred and discredited former president; and who is ready at any moment, and on government time, to take a wheedling call from either of her bulbous brothers? This is also the unscrupulous female who until recently was willing to play the race card on President-elect Obama and (in spite of her own complete want of any foreign-policy qualifications) to ridicule him for lacking what she only knew about by way of sordid backstairs dealing. What may look like wound-healing and magnanimity to some looks like foolhardiness and masochism to me. [bold mine-R]

And I would be remiss if I didn’t point your attention to The American Conservative’s Daniel Larison, (spinning off of a post by Philip Klein in The American Spectator, which is also worth reading):

So one of two things happened. Either Clinton has embraced Obama’s vision for fundamental change, or Obama has succumbed to “conventional Washington thinking.” —Philip Klein

Not to be a broken record, but of course it is the latter. Well, except that he didn’t “succumb”–he embraces the conventional thinking, just as he does wherever he goes. As his political universe has changed and expanded, the conventional thinking he has had to embrace changed as well. This is what his friends and admirers call pragmatism, and it is a function of the temperament that Obamacons invoke when pressed to explain their support. This has been reasonably clear for at least the past several months. When running against conventional Washington thinking suited him as an outsider and challenger candidate, he did that. Now that he is firmly ensconced in Washington, conventional Washington thinking will be all right. This isn’t an accusation or even that much of a complaint–I have given up complaining about Obama’s conventional ways. At this point, it is merely a description. As I said immediately after his election:

If you have a high opinion of the Washington establishment and bipartisan consensus politics, Obama’s election should come as a relief. If you believe, as I do, that most of our policy failures stretching back beyond the last eight years are the product of a failed establishment and a bankrupt consensus, an Obama administration represents the perpetuation of a system that is fundamentally broken.

Most people in the broad “middle” seem to be relieved by Obama’s moves in the last few weeks, so I have to conclude that they don’t have much of a problem with conventional Washington thinking, either. The majority is not just getting the government they deserve, but apparently it is also the government they want. When it fails them, as it is going to do, I don’t want to hear them complaining about the problems of the status quo. [bold mine-R]

Well, well… the lustre of “Obama for Change!” was bound to wear off — it seems that it’s wearing off sooner rather than later. But if you’d like to relive the glory days of the campaign, when everything seemed possible, fear not! As I found out from an Obama campaign email (yes, campaign … One would think that a billion dollars later they could quit sending these things out to every American who ever visited their website), you can, with your own personal sterling silver Obama keychain! (To drive, presumably, your new GM Bailout Coupe right off the lot.)

Leave yours in the comments.

Now something has gone wrong with all three television sets. They will get only Sarah Palin.

I can play a kind of Alaskan roulette. Any random channel clicked on by the remote brings up that eager face, with its continuing assaults on the English Lang.

There she is with Larry and Matt and just about everyone else but Dr. Phil (so far). If she is not yet on “Judge Judy,” I suspect it can’t be for lack of trying. …

What on earth are our underpaid teachers, laboring in the vineyards of education, supposed to tell students about the following sentence, committed by the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High and gleaned by my colleague Maureen Dowd for preservation for those who ask, “How was it she talked?”

My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.

And, she concluded, “never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or a continent, I just don’t know about this issue.”

It’s admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of words could be removed without noticeably affecting the sense, if any.

2.) Most astute analysis of the potential auto bailout: Many times in past months, I’ve directed your gaze to the wise words of Pat Buchanan, former Nixon speechwriter, Reagan adviser and fringe presidential candidate. There are plenty of places I part ways with him, but the man’s political instincts are usually keen — this post about “conservatives” and their strange opposition to a meager $25 million to bail out our auto industry is worthwhile reading, even if (like me) you aren’t sure you agree with it:

Understandably, Republicans are seething.

When Hank Paulson demanded $700 billion to haul away the trash in the dumpsters of JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs — assuring us we could hold a garage sale of the junk — they rebelled. They acted as the nation, by 100 to one, demanded. They killed the Wall Street bailout.

The Dow quickly sank another 1,000 points, and, charged with criminal irresponsibility by the elites, the GOP buckled, reversed itself, rescued the bailout — and was wiped out on Nov. 4.

Now we hear from Paulson that the $700 billion Congress voted will not, after all, be used to buy up all that rotten paper on the books of the big banks. Some banks are using the cash to buy other banks.

So Republicans are right to be enraged. They are victims of the biggest bait-and-switch in political history. But they are now about to do something terminally stupid. With GM, Ford, and Chrysler teetering on the brink, they are turning a cold stone face to Detroit …

And to let the auto industry die is to write America out of much of the economic future of the planet. [Bolds mine-R]

Go read the whole thing. You’ll be a little smarter afterward.

3.) Funniest totally lame YouTube thing I just found: Thanks, Nick, for pointing me to this:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J6S6mDyNvY[/youtube]

As it stands, it’s not me — it’s Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber. I’d already heard he’d secured an agent in Nashville for a country music career; turns out, that’s not the half of it. Over at SecureOurDream.com, Joe’s not only blogging, but shilling a book that he won’t be writing a word of hasn’t written yet, AND a $14.95 subscription to the Joe the Plumber fan club.

The design is awful (though it’s noted that “SECUREOURDREAM.COM VERSION-2 [why the hyphen?] COMING SOON”), and the blog post too innocuous to really get rabid pro-plumber conservatives on their feet:

Congratulations to Barack Obama. The American electorate has decided that he will be our next president. As I have stated, I will honor and support my president, but there will be no free ride. When President-Elect Obama takes office in January, his term of service to the American people begins. We wish our new president blessings of wisdom and good judgment, and we pray he hearkens to our voice if ever we feel our American Dream is being threatened. It will be a loud voice, so good luck trying to ignore it.

None of the links go anywhere, really, except to “coming soon” or more ads for the book. My friend Adam notes that this is probably about a month too late… who really cares about Joe the Plumber at this point? I do think, however, that he might make a good sitcom star — the straight-laced, hard-luck husband whose wife is always getting into shenanigans and whose friends are always looking to him for advice. He’d definitely be as good as Jeff Foxworthy, right?